Endless Sky: The Final Frontier is a Star-Trek themed full overhaul mod for the open-source game 'Endless Sky'.
The mod is planned to feature hundreds of ships from dozens of races, weapons and outfits of all shapes and sizes, a galaxy map multitudes larger than the original, and authentic Star Trek themed content throughout.
Development is fueled by ambition and progress is slow, but with any luck, the mod will reach beta, and eventually full release.
Endless Sky: The Final Frontier v0.0.1 Alpha is released! You can download it here:
34 Ships in total were added, including many iconic ship classes from the original movies and TV shows.
The entire 'Enterprise' line was added, including the 'Century Class':
Other prominent starships from all across the board were added:
Some lesser-known starships were added, including one of the first warp-capable ships (Conestoga):
Finally, several small craft were added, including shuttles, runabouts, and fighters:
8 types of Phasers were added:
6 types of Torpedo Launchers were added:
4 Types of projectile-based weapons were added:
Not many outfits were added this patch, and most of the original outfit statistics are built into the ships.
There are still a few outfits that needed to be added to enable certain mechanics:
There are some other, hidden outfits scattered around in the data files. These are a WIP.
Many new sound effects were added, some of which replacing stock sounds. This video covers most of them:
A deeper look into the inner workings of ES:TFF and a more detailed description of the game balance.
In alpha v 0.0.1, the energy and heat system is significantly simplified compared to the stock system. Currently, Ships generate energy and heat on their own without outfits, and ship movement does not drain energy or create heat.
This simplification was done for two reasons: To help ease the process of future game balancing, and to temporarily eliminate the need to implement power generators or cooling systems.
Here are a few numbers regarding ship heat and energy:
Most ships generate power at a rate just under their stock weapon's power demand. This means that a ship that is fresh out of the shipyard will just barely keep it's weapons firing, and will run out of power reserves after 15-30 seconds of non-stop weapons fire.
All ships generate heat at the same rate they generate energy. This means that a ship that has a power generation rate of 10 will also have a heat generation rate of 10.
Weapons also draw power and generate heat at the same rate, which in the case of phaser beams, is equal to the damage output as well. (e.g. Damage: 600/s Energy: 600/s Heat: 600/s)
Currently, Hull repairing and Shield recharging are the only other things that require power, and they do not put out any heat.
For any stock ship, recharging shields drains 10% of your power generation, and repairing hull drains an additional 20%. doing both at the same time requires 30% of the ship's stock power generation, greatly decreasing weapon proficiency.
Ships were given almost arbitrary values for their hull and shield capacities, scaled to match their size or age.
Simply put, small shuttlecraft are more fragile than cruisers, and ships from the 25th century are much more resilient than ships from the 22nd.
Other than those restrictions, hull and shield values are almost completely arbitrary, and are 100% open to change.
As more ships are introduced, the hull and shield values will even out and become much more balanced.
Different types of ships regenerate their hull and shields at different rates. This list shows how long each type takes to fully regenerate their hull and shields (in seconds).
All of these values are open to change.
Some of the weapons, like torpedo launchers, have pretty straight-forward characteristics. On the other hand, some weapons, phaser arrays specifically, are designed to act in a very odd but specific way.
Phaser arrays by them selves fire for roughly a second, and have a reload period of up to several seconds. If you mount more than one array on a ship, then they will fire one after the other. This was intentional, and it lets us mount multiple phasers without them all firing at once. (This not only looked bad, it also required sound effect files to be really long in order to prevent audio looping)
Different phaser beams have separate firing times and reloads. This list will show you how long each weapon fires for, how long each reload time is, and how many can be mounted to a single ship without the firing periods overlapping:
The Pulse Phaser, Phaser Cannon, and Heavy Phaser Cannon all act similarly. They fire 5, 3, and 4 projectiles (respectively), then they reload for a couple seconds. (Currently they have very similar projectile sprites, and they use the same sound effect. This is planned to change.)
The 5 Photon Torpedo Launchers are quite similar, and follow secondary weapon standards very closely. As a result, the only differences between them are firepower, reload time, and ammunition capacity.
The Quantum Torpedo Launcher fires faster and has more projectile velocity than the photon torpedo launchers, but they don't do nearly as much hull damage, and they have a relatively small ammo capacity.
You may download the current version here. Test it out, and let me know what you think. Any and all suggestions are appreciated, and bug reports are invaluable.
-Swingfire / Theta
The first iteration of the mod will be released within the week. Here's what to expect:
The Klingons are de-cloaking! All hands, battle stations!
Full download of Endless Sky: The Final Frontier version 0.0.1 Alpha
Sageyourpal, nice work on the ship detail. I also like the phaser and photon torpedo effects.
What I am concerned with is that the size of the ships does not seem to be to the correct scale in comparison to the vanilla ships. For example, a Constitution Class ship is no bigger than the Sparrow. I also believe that crew and cargo space is off too(1/10?). Ships seem a little wimpy because of this when in reality they should be a little more advanced than the vanilla ships.
Just my take. If there is a reason for this, perhaps they should be in an alternate "Midget Galaxy" where they can be taken seriously.
Really, i would love to be able to kick butte with the Enterprise, but this just can't do it.
why is there no uss vengence?
"I used the v0.0.1 version for "added coolness" on play-through with 0.9.8. Very nice documentation here in mod-page, bravo. I hope you get back to v0.0.3 someday. Only suggestions I have at the moment: 1) isolate
Federation (and Klingon) space and shipyards in some corner of the map (maybe already done in v0.0.2?), and make players earn a license for the nicer ships, even a trivial requirement (to help preserve game tech-power
progression); 2) make the Defiant in-space image a little bigger, it's difficult to see its orientation when zoomed out. My jump-upgraded "Defiant swarm" kicks a** and protects my Rivers with Star Trek style.
If I was useful, I would help! Looks awesome!
if you want to help just message me at my email davisdylan04@gmail.com or look for Sage in Steam or Swingfire on Steam with any ideas you might have i'm open for suggestions.
Add the borgs!!!!,i would love to use a sphere to torture the federation underlings!!!.
this is a thought that has crossed my mind but my minimal photo editing skills prevented it. i'll think about it more and see what I can do.
What exactly is the "Century Class"
Also, will you be adding more ships from Star Trek Online? I see you have the Yellowstone Runabout which is a STO creation is all.
Can't wait to see this mod further developed, Endless Sky really is an under appreciated game full of so much modding potential!